Wednesday, November 28, 2007

"The Story of Qiu Zhu is about the normative confusion caused when state law penetrates customary society, and specifically how a young wife, Qiu Zhu, tries to use law to get justice. Instead, she gets law and the movie is about the difference. It is set in a remote agricultural village in China at the time (1992) of the passage of the Administrative Litigation Law, which allowed citizens to sue officials for malfeasance. The village secretary and Qiu Zhu's husband have a fight, and the former injures the latter in a sensitive area of his body that affects him not only physically but as a matter of honor. Qiu Zhu takes it upon herself to get justice for her husband, first trying informal means, but eventually turning to the formal legal system. It is a great movie for those interested in law and development, law and culture, and modernization in general. It is also a very good movie - perhaps Zhang Yimo's best."

Thursday, November 1, 2007

RenditionEgyptian man, suspected of terrorism, disappears on his way to Washington DC. A CIA agent is tasked with conducting an 'unorthodox interrogation' in a secret detention facility...

The KingdomA terrorist bomb detonates inside a western housing compound in Saudi Arabia igniting an international incident. While diplomats slowly debate equations of territorialism, a Special Agent from FBI negotiates a secret five-day trip to locate the culprit. While Saudi authorities in general are not pleased with the 'interference', a like-minded Saudi colonel helps them find their way to an extremist cell bent on further destruction...

Total DenialTells the story of a pipeline built by two oil companies, Total and Unocal in Burma, that formed the basis for the historic Doe v. Unocal lawsuit in which fifteen indigenous people successfully sued two corporate giants in the U.S. courts for complicity in forced labor, assaults, rape and other human rights abuses.

O JerusalemBased on the book of the same name by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins which seeks to capture the events surrounding the creation of the modern state of Israel.

Terror's Advocate (L'Avocat de la terreur)The story of Jacques Vergès, the lawyer who has defended some of the most controversial figures of the 20th century - from anti-colonial bombers in Algeria, to left-wing extremists like Carlos the Jackal, to right-wing dictators like Slobodan Milošević. One of his his most infamous clients the Nazi, was Klaus Barbie. Vergès also defended Djamila Bouhired, the woman who planted the bomb at the Milk Bar, an incident famously dramatized in the The Battle of Algiers. See here for more details...

Meeting ResistanceA documentary on the Iraq War from the perspective of Iraqis resisting military occupation of their country. For more see here.

The documentary revisits three of the communities that forcibly expelled their entire African American populations in the period between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression. See here for more.

Please note, this post does not touch upon the quality f any of these films, although some of them are extremely interesting.